Strong Compute, a Sydney, Australia-based startup that helps developers remove the bottlenecks in their machine learning training pipelines, today announced that it has raised a $7.8 million seed round. The round includes a total of 30 funds and angels, including the likes of Sequoia Capital India, Blackbird, Folklore and Skip Capital, as well as Y
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About 80% of household retail in sub-Saharan Africa is delivered through informal channels, which perennially face several challenges like stockouts, leading to an instability in earnings, and a lack of attractiveness to financiers. These challenges befall millions of micro-retailers across the continent, and Betastore, a B2B retail marketplace for informal retailers, is working to resolve
Whether to power translation to document summarization, enterprises are increasing their investments in natural language processing (NLP) technologies. According to a 2021 survey from John Snow Labs and Gradient Flow, 60% of tech leaders indicated that their NLP budgets grew by at least 10% compared to 2020, while a third said that spending climbed by
Mintlify, a startup developing software to automate software documentation tasks, today announced that it raised $2.8 million in a seed round led by by Bain Capital Ventures with participation from TwentyTwo Ventures and Quinn Slack, Sourcegraph’s co-founder. CEO Han Wang says that the proceeds will be put toward product development and doubling Mintlify’s core, three-person
Given the likely global recession, small businesses are reaching for new kinds of financing. Thus, the Buy Now Pay Later business model is now expanding into this B2B world at a rate of knots. Playter has raised backing to do this, as has Hokodo, Billie and Tranch, to name a few other players. But in
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Enterprise productivity company Box reported results earlier this week for the first quarter of its fiscal 2023, the three-month period ending April 30. Box managed to beat revenue expectations, though it missed on adjusted per-share profit. Shares of the company initially lost modest ground. You might read the above paragraph and wonder why we’re digging into
As expected, the Broadcom-VMware deal is a go. The chip giant intends to snap up the virtualization software company for $61 billion in cash and stock, along with taking on $8 billion in VMware debt. It’s not an inexpensive transaction, but thanks to a “go-shop” provision that gives VMware 40 days to “solicit, receive, evaluate
Welcome to The Interchange, a take on this week’s fintech news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. We’ve all been keeping up with the recent drama of Stripe vs. Plaid. Rather than rehash all that here, I’ll point you to some of our recent articles on the topic and just summarize:
On the Chain Reaction podcast this week, Lux Capital’s newest investor, Grace Isford, joined us to talk about the opaque but crucial world of web3 infrastructure. At Lux, Isford invests in the companies working behind the scenes to make sure crypto exchanges are secure and reliable enough to avoid being hacked. Before joining Lux this February,
‘The industry is going to contract differently’ Rebecca Bellan 8 hours Dan Lewis, co-founder and CEO of digital freight company Convoy, didn’t start his company because he had a deep and abiding passion for trucking. At least, not at first. The executive has a background in strategy and management consulting that progressed into a career
All is not well in smartphone land. The industry was headed for a slowdown well before SARS-CoV-2 entered the picture. The glory days of expanding markets and bi-annual upgrades are seemingly at an end, and things have only been exacerbated by two years of financial hardships and supply chain constraints. For all these reasons, it’s
Welcome to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. Cannabis, sex tech and psychedelics are often lumped together under the “vice” category — a characterization that prevents many VCs from investing in these
Hey everyone, and welcome back to Chain Reaction. Last week, we talked about the rough road ahead for Coinbase. This week, we’re talking a bit about Andreessen Horowitz’s multibillion-dollar bet on web3’s continued viability. Read on to check out the latest episode of the Chain Reaction podcast as well. To get this in your inbox
Sequoia takes things seriously. The storied venture firm is known to react to macroeconomic events with grand memos aimed at portfolio companies and sometimes the entrepreneurship scene at large. Most recently, Sequoia created a 52-slide deck, first reported by The Information, titled “Adapting to Endure.” The document reads like a follow-up course to its infamously ill-timed
TikTok is extending its Marketing Partner Program to add new content marketing partners, the company told TechCrunch. The expansion will allow marketers to manage their TikTok accounts without leaving their third-party content marketing platforms. The short-form video app is partnering with Sprout Social, Hootsuite, Sprinklr, Emplifi, Dash Hudson, Khoros, Brandwatch and Later for the initial launch.
Jan.13 — Tesla shares rose above $500 for the first time on Monday as Wall Street analysts played catch up with the electric vehicle maker’s share price, which has doubled from October. Michael Kushma of Morgan Stanley Investment Management discusses on “Bloomberg The Open.”
When consumed in moderation, sugar is not bad for us, and humans’ ability to detect sweetness is etched into our DNA, but with the abundance of it in today’s food and drinks, we are getting more than we should. Companies have created alternatives to sugar over the years, like Stevia, while others have tapped into
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Happily we were once again at full strength this week, with Alex Wilhelm, Natasha Mascarenhas and Mary Ann Azevedo chatting, and Grace handling production. You can tell from the topic list today that we are in
In an effort to make its notoriously dense user agreements less labyrinthine, Meta has rewritten and redesigned how that information is presented. The company insists that the changes are in form, not function, bolding some lines, adding subheaders and illustrations instead of presenting that information as a giant wall of text. The result is still
Want to bring inflation to heel? There’s no single, simple fix, of course, or we would have done it already. But a good place to start would be weaning the economy off gasoline and diesel. Prices for fossil fuels are through the roof. Gas prices are up over 75% since last year, and diesel is
In sales, a win/loss analysis is the process of determining why deals are ultimately won or lost. That’s relatively self-explanatory, but more specifically, a win/loss review aims to contrast a sales organization’s performance with an industry or competitors and figure out why an outcome occurred. This involves gathering data, including sales notes and customer feedback,
Eric Landau Contributor Before Eric Landau co-founded Encord, he spent nearly a decade at DRW, where he was lead quantitative researcher on a global equity delta one desk and put thousands of models into production. He holds an S.M. in Applied Physics from Harvard University, an M.S. in Electrical Engineering and a B.S. in Physics
News broke yesterday that Substack, the popular newsletter publishing tool, called off fundraising plans for a Series C after a raise at its price target failed to materialize. The company’s revenue base, when compared with its hoped-for valuation, was too small to support the numbers that the startup had in mind. This is not a
OnlyFans founder Tim Stokley is getting into the web3 game with a new NFT startup, Zoop, launching this summer. On Zoop, people can buy, sell, and trade 3D NFT “playing cards” of their favorite influencers and celebrities. The limited-edition digital cards on Zoop will be officially licensed, according to the company, though it wasn’t clear
Bacterial secretions might dye your future wardrobe, and that’d be an improvement. That’s because textiles usually get their hues from toxic chemicals, and the resulting wastewater—laden with dyes, acids and formaldehyde—destroys rivers, such as those surrounding Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh. Wastewater treatment, when it happens, is just one of the energy-intensive (read: carbon-spewing)
The cannabis industry is doing very well in the United States: more than 75% of the population lives in a state where access is permitted, and the legal market is expected to generate $33 billion this year. A black market still eats into the industry’s bottom line, however, and a patchwork of state regulations artificially
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. It’s Thursday, May 26, 2022, and we have a busy day of news on the site today. Here are the gems sparkling in the spotlight of our journalistic gaze. For later in
Early-stage proptech startups have a potential new source of capital in 1Sharpe Ventures, which recently closed its $90 million inaugural fund. Roofstock co-founder and chairman Gregor Watson and real estate investor Rob Bloemker started the venture firm in 2021, and had their first close last year. The pair say the fund was “oversubscribed.” For the
The world’s richest man isn’t above trying to get a discount, apparently. In a new lawsuit, Twitter shareholders are suing Elon Musk, alleging that he manipulated the price of the company’s stock for his own benefit in the course of agreeing to buy the company. The lawsuit represents a group of Twitter investors but would